Software's summer
Everyone spent the summer watching chip stocks. The software names quietly did this instead - and chips went the other way.
Three months, 29 May to 31 August 2026. Closing price to closing price:
Salesforce +34.8% Shopify +24.1% Microsoft +12.7% Spotify +9.2% Intuit +8.4%
Over the exact same stretch the S&P 500 rose about 1%, and SMH - the main semiconductor ETF, the basket most people mean when they say "chip stocks" - fell 7.1%.
Worth being precise about what this is and is not.
It is not a story about chips collapsing. Nvidia was actually UP 4.6% over these three months. The weakness sat in the rest of the sector: Qualcomm -32%, Arm -31%, Intel -22%, Broadcom -17%.
And it is a three-month window, which is short. Measured from the start of 2026 the chip names are still far ahead - SMH is up roughly 49% year to date against 7% for the software basket. Software had a good quarter; it has not won the year.
These five are also not the biggest movers in software. Atlassian, Veeva, Okta and Palo Alto all beat Salesforce over the same window. They are here because they are the ones you have actually used - TurboTax, Spotify, Windows, Shopify, Salesforce.
